5 Tips for Building an Effective Content Marketing Plan

If you’ve seen the movie “Field of Dreams,” you’ll probably remember the phrase “If you build it, he will come.” In today’s marketing world, creating content is a critical component for establishing your company as a thought-leader in the industry, nurturing your potential customers through the buyer’s journey, and setting yourself apart from your competition. If you build content to align with your inbound marketing strategy, new leads will come. The key is building content that's valuable to your readers.

Here are five tips to help you develop an effective content marketing plan.

1. Evaluate What Has Worked

First, and foremost, if you are currently creating content of any form (blogs, eNewsletters, whitepapers, etc.), spend some time analyzing past performance. Use data to drive your content decisions.

Ask questions, such as:

• What content has generated the most views?
• What content has generated the most interactions?
• For the top performing pieces of content, are there certain things they have in common? If so, continue to use this and build content around what is working for you.

2. Do Your Key Term Research

In order to develop your content so it performs at its best to generate organic traffic to your site, you’ll want to infuse key terms relevant to your business.

Not sure what these key terms are? Google’s keyword planner is a great resource for finding and evaluating keyword opportunities. The Google Search Console will also provide you with the top terms that have driven people to your website. Also, make sure you are considering long-term keywords as a focus in your planning.

3. Determine Content Format

Content can be found in many forms. It can be a simple blog post, engaging infographic, eBook, video, etc. Think about your potential customer and what type of content they find most beneficial. Then, try different formats and reuse your content in many forms. One of the approaches we take is the “Content Pillar Approach” where upfront is done in the pre-planning of a large document, such as an eBook and it is sliced and diced into blog content, social content, and more. This has been helpful to our team for efficiencies in the creation of content.

4. Determine Frequency

Next, you’ll want to determine how much you want to publish and what you have resources for. If you have a blog, for example, start with a goal of one post every other week. See what sort of traction you are getting and try to increase this to once a week. If you are developing content for social media, evaluate your posting strategy with what people’s expectations are for each platform. For example, if you are posting to Twitter, you are going to want to be dedicated and post consistently.   

5. Put together an Action Plan 

At Leighton Interactive, one of our common practices is to create monthly content calendars. The content calendar includes things such as the following:

• Title
• Author
• Main Idea(s)
• Keyword(s) to be used
• Publish Date
• Which CTA is to be used with the content
• Campaign

This content calendar helps our team formulate a plan of action for the months ahead in relation to our campaign strategies. Then, we write the content, enter it into our marketing platform HubSpot, and publish. With every piece of content we publish, we analyze its performance, then determine what has been successful in order to build future content on what has worked. 

So, there you have it. Five tips for creating an effective content marketing plan. One last bonus tip – make sure you have a way for people to subscribe to your content, whether it’s a blog subscription, eNewsletter subscription, or any other communication you create. This will help you stay in front of people who want to hear from you. If you build it (content), he (leads) will come. Now, it’s time to get started with your content strategy.